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Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory by Tabea Linhard

2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 131; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2016.0035

1080-6598

David A. Wacks,

Spanish Culture and Identity

Reviewed by: Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory by Tabea Linhard David Wacks Tabea Linhard, Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014. 230 pp. Jewish Spain is a study of how various forms of cultural production in modern Spain represent and deploy the Jewish experience in Spain. Linhard is one of a group of scholars taking a much-awaited new look at the Jewish imaginary in modern Spain, who came together in 2011 to edit a special issue of Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies titled Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (12.1), reissued in 2013 by Routledge as an edited volume with the same title. These essays are nothing short of a manifesto of new Spanish Jewish cultural studies, an area that has long been wanting a champion. In this sense, Jewish Spain is an exciting departure in the study of the Jewish experience and memory in modern Spain. Linhard brings together a variety of interrelated topics in this study, with the goal of explaining how “writers and witnesses narrate instances of Jewish life in Spain’s turbulent twentieth century by invoking the remote past” (4). Her focus is on how these works “[bundle]” the various contradictions inherent in the idea of a ‘Jewish Spain’ “into coherent narratives” (4), laying bare the ideologies and political contexts that shape the narratives in question. Linhard reads a variety of sources, including personal memoirs, novels, films, and touristic itineraries and supporting materials. She frames her inquiry primarily using concepts drawn from memory and trauma studies, which links her work to the fields of Holocaust, Memory, and Transition (to democracy in Spain) studies. As the title suggests, she also makes some effort to locate her work in the field of Mediterranean studies, but mostly this is simply a framing function of the geography of the authors and works (Spain, France, Salonika, Morroco, Egypt, Israel) rather than of any sustained theoretical program. In chapter one, “Mapping Notalgia: Velódromo de invierno and Sepharad” (31-64), Linhard studies two contemporary novels, written respectively by Juana Salabert, a Spanish author born in France, and Antonio Múñoz Molina, a Spanish author. Both titles appeared in 2001 to critical acclaim and have generated considerable critical bibliography since their publication. In this chapter, Linhard explains “contradictions and ambiguities” inherent in the realities that “made deliverance from the Holocaust in Spain possible” (32). In both cases, she concludes that nostalgia is the narrative resource that enables authors to weave a stable sense of identity from a chaotic, contradictory, and traumatic reality. Chapter two, “Exile in Sepharad: The Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot and Memorias judías” (65-90), examines two memoirs of Jewish experience in Spain. The first (Mezuzah) is a personal account by Trudi Alexi narrating her own process of traveling through the monuments of Jewish Spain in search of her own crypto-Jewish (Marrano) heritage. The second (Memorias) is a collection of oral histories of Spanish Jewry during the twentieth century edited by Martine Berthelot. Alexy, a Christian, narrates her own journey through Spain in search of her family’s Marrano history. Her narrative strategy is to [End Page 558] punctuate her travels with historical anecdotes about documented cases of the persecution of crypto-Jews as a kind of foil for the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. According to Linhard, this “provides [Alexy’s] narrative with a desired coherence” (81) at the price of essentializing the crypto-Jewsh experience, and flattening the differences between the Spanish Jewish experiences of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. The profiles of the modern-day Jews in Memorias also juxtapose the present with the past, but the tendency is more contrastive, emphasizing the ability of modern Jews to survive and even thrive in Spain despite the anti-Semitism and instability they faced throughout. In chapter three, “Responsible for the fate of the world: Ángel Sanz Briz and Jorge Perlasca” (91-122), Linhard turns her focus to a historical episode drawn from the drama of the World War II era. Ángel Sanz Briz was a Spanish diplomat in Hungary who is celebrated as a hero in the Jewish world for having issued hundreds of Spanish visas...